The Garden and the Machine

The aim of this paper is to explore how the concepts of garden and machine might inform our understanding of the complex relationship between infrastructure and nature. The garden is introduced as a third nature and used to shed a critical light on the promotion of landscape ‘as’ infrastructure, which has been developed within the current discourses on landscape urbanism and ecological urbanism. It will be argued that the emphasis of performance, functionality and horizontality, which seems to follow the promotion of landscape as infrastructure, in some cases could be counterproductive in relation to the environmental problems being addressed, and that we need gardens of reflection, interrogation and doubt, in order to engage with the deeper complexities of territorial transformations.